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I’m spending months coding the old way

miguelconner.substack.com

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Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#311

Post by Hrun0 »

andersmurphy wrote: post #305
elAhmo wrote: post #236

It is amazing to see such a change in the industry: this title is something nearly every single developer could've said ~two years ago, now anyone claiming to code by hand is almost like an endangered species.

The bigger change is those that do write by hand have stopped open sourcing their work. The age of sharing innovation for free is quickly coming to an end. I also expect a bunch of open source/open core projects to go closed source in the next few months.

YC startups still have to be open source though, right?

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#312

Post by wrs »

bsaul wrote: post #307
jimbokun wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why whiteboards used to be so popular in many/most tech company offices. Doing this exact same process interactively with other people, and a not to NOT ERASE or later taking a picture of the whiteboard with your phone.

"used to be" ?? What are engineering team doing nowadays when discussing architecturing their systems ?

In my experience the last several years, primarily we’re all on Zoom waving our hands and making false promises to update Confluence with what we talked about. I miss offices with walls and whiteboards.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#313

Post by roughly »

sixtyj wrote: post #202
apricot wrote: post #86

I am this very term teaching 18-year-old students 6502 assembly programming using an emulated Apple II Plus. They've had intro to Python, data structures, and OO programming courses using a modern programming environment. Now, they are programming a chip from the seventies using an editor/assembler that was written in 1983 and has a line editor, not a full-screen one. We had a total of 10 hours of class + lab where I…

I thought it was common practice to think things through first and only then start doing something, but it seems that these days a lot of people have taken inspiration from Zuckerberg’s motto, “move fast and break things”… I’ll never forget that.

One place I've seen people get caught here is when they don't actually have the information they need to solve the problem - when they don't understand the problem space well enough, or they don't know the boundaries of the systems or technologies they're using well enough, or there's unanswered questions. At that point, I've seen people dig into research projects and 15 page design document discussions that would all be obviated by a day or two of just doing the thing and seeing what happens.

My understanding is that was the actual point of "move fast and break things" - gain knowledge by trying stuff to help you make better decisions, even if you make a mistake and need to roll back or fix it. The art to this is figuring out how to contain the negative consequences of whatever you're testing, but by all means, experiment early to gather information.

I've stated it to mentees as "don't be afraid to start a fire as long as you know where the fire extinguishers are" - it's OK to fail in the service of learning so long as you fail in a contained way.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#314

Post by roughly »

sixtyj wrote: post #225
sixtyj wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought it was common practice to think things through first and only then start doing something, but it seems that these days a lot of people have taken inspiration from Zuckerberg’s motto, “move fast and break things”… I’ll never forget that.

P.S.: I didn't mean that in a negative way; I was just surprised that we have to learn this because our kids have forgotten it, or probably we don’t teach planning in elementary schools.

TBH I think the bigger problem for how we teach kids are twofold:

1. There's a right answer to every problem in school

2. If you got it wrong, that's bad, and you did bad.

The pattern I've seen from younger people these days is a learned helplessness, where there's no room for them to be creative in school, and any attempt to do so runs the risk of failing an assignment, getting a B, missing out on Harvard, and spending the rest of their lives poor in a ditch, or so they're told.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#315

Post by dehrmann »

spockz wrote: post #201
apricot wrote: post #86

I am this very term teaching 18-year-old students 6502 assembly programming using an emulated Apple II Plus. They've had intro to Python, data structures, and OO programming courses using a modern programming environment. Now, they are programming a chip from the seventies using an editor/assembler that was written in 1983 and has a line editor, not a full-screen one. We had a total of 10 hours of class + lab where I…

One of my favourite experiences coming up as an engineer was working with a very senior engineer right in the beginning. Whenever he had a task or problem, he would start out thinking, maybe doodling a bit on paper, go for a walk, and only then sit down at his computer and start typing. He would type in one go only compiling in the end, and it would work. (Even typos were rare.) All this to say that it is extremely u…

I see some of the value in planning, but experimentation is so cheap, there's also a lot of value in trying it, seeing what works, and learning from it. The main drawback I see from experimentation is failing to understand why something worked.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#316

Post by jodrellblank »

slopinthebag wrote: post #10
mchusma wrote: post #3

You should do what you want, and as a break it’s fine. But IMO right now the most leverage for most people is learning how to effectively manage agents. It’s really hard. Not many are truly good with it. It will be relevant for a long time.

Yeah, it's really difficult to remember to tell it "make no mistakes". Typing a prompt is also really hard, especially when you have to remember the cli command to open the agent. Sometimes I even forget if I need to use "medium", "high", or "xhigh" for a task.

I may as well post this troll comment somewhere and get it out of my system, but have you noticed how people called "slopinthebag" who claim to hate slop and enshittification are the same people who make barrel-scrapingly low-quality thought-free comments which make the sites they are posting on worse for everyone?

Shouldn't they be the people making the most substantial, artisanal, sweat-of-the-brow deep-thought comments?

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#317

Post by YZF »

apricot wrote: post #86

I am this very term teaching 18-year-old students 6502 assembly programming using an emulated Apple II Plus. They've had intro to Python, data structures, and OO programming courses using a modern programming environment. Now, they are programming a chip from the seventies using an editor/assembler that was written in 1983 and has a line editor, not a full-screen one. We had a total of 10 hours of class + lab where I…

Agree it's good. I used to program with these tools because that's all I had and when I had better tools I moved onto to them. We also used to build our own better tooling.

When I built my first guitar I had very few tools so I used what I had since I'm cheap ;) Then I bought better tools and it made my life a lot easier. But I got some lessons from the experience. Mostly though it was a pain that's solved by better tooling.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#318

Post by ironman1478 »

I didn't realize how I learned to develop software from 2011-2015 was the old way lol. (Am I old now?).

I appreciate that the author understands why doing everything "the old way" is good. AI is a tool, it can't be a replacement for how you think and it can't be a replacement for the actual work.

I wish more people had a desire for the inner workings of things because it makes you better at actually using tools. Implementing compilers, databases, OSes, control systems, etc. is like practicing swimming. Yeah, you might not ever swim again but when you need to the muscle memory will be there when you need to get out of the ocean (I know this is a strained metaphor).

Knowing more can only be a boon to using LLMs for coding and it's really a general problem in ML. I work in a science field as hw / sw engineer and I've seen so many pure data science people say they can replace all our work with a model, flail for 2 years and then their whole org gets canned. If they just read a textbook or collaborated (which they never do, no matter how polite you are), they'd have been able to leverage their data science skills to build something great and instead they just toil away never making it past step 0.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#319

Post by dijksterhuis »

bccdee wrote: post #306
shevy-java wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This reminds me of what zed Shaw said, for some reason code written without an ide is better and he's not sure why. I am not sure whether the statement is correct; I am not sure whether the statement is incorrect either. But I tested many editors and IDEs over the years. IDEs can be useful, but they also hide abstractions. I noticed this with IntelliJ IDEA in particular; before I used it I was using my old, simple…

Simpler tools are a forcing function for simplicity. If you don't have code search, you'll need to write code that is legible without searching. If you don't have auto-refactoring utils, you'll have to be stricter about information-hiding. And if you don't have AI, you might hesitate to commit to the first thing you think of. You might go back to the drawing board in search of a deeper, simpler abstraction and end up…

> Simpler tools are a forcing function for simplicity. If you don't have code search, you'll need to write code that is legible without searching.

i was working in a place that had a real tech debt laden system. it was an absolute horror show. an offshore dev, the “manager” guy and i were sitting in a zoom call and i was ranting about how over complicated and horrific the codebase was, using one component as a specific example.

the offshore dev proceeded to use the JetBrains Ctrl + B keybind (jump to usages/definitions) to try and walk through how it all worked — “it’s really simple!” he said.

after a while i got frustrated, and interrupted him to point out that he’d had to navigate across something like 4 different files, multiple different levels of class inheritance and i don’t know how many different methods on those classes just to explain one component of a system used by maybe 5 people.

i used nano for a lot of that job. it forced me to be smarter by doing things simpler.

Re: I’m spending months coding the old way

#320

Post by leg100 »

andersmurphy wrote: post #305
elAhmo wrote: post #236

It is amazing to see such a change in the industry: this title is something nearly every single developer could've said ~two years ago, now anyone claiming to code by hand is almost like an endangered species.

The bigger change is those that do write by hand have stopped open sourcing their work. The age of sharing innovation for free is quickly coming to an end. I also expect a bunch of open source/open core projects to go closed source in the next few months.

I'm not sure if that's the case. Of course one has always been able to copy or plagiarise open source code. The value of open source projects is that they continue to be maintained by people that understand the code base. LLM's lifting that code doesn't change that.
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